First image of a Black Hole

Almost 500 terabytes of data from every telescope was collected in five nights running. The targeted supermassive black hole is hidden in plain sight, lurking in the centre of the Milky Way in a region called the Sagittarius constellation, some 26,000 light years from Earth. However, it might take months to develop the final image.

The experiment involved a number of telescopes all over the globe, like the 30-m IRAM telescope in Spanish Sierra Nevada mountains, South Pole telescope in Antarctica, James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Cosmology telescope in the desert of northern Chile. All the data collected from the respective telescopes will be flown on jetliners to the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, where it will be processed by supercomputers.

It is believed that if the scientists succeed in getting the results, it may help in understanding the mysteries of our universe and how it came into being.